Our View: Energy issues won't go away

Thursday

Jan 8, 2015 at 2:01 AM

It won’t be clear for awhile whether Cape Wind has a future.

Legal interventions have already been mentioned; the letters from NStar and National Grid ending the power purchase agreements will trigger a review process; and the two utilities might not be utterly opposed to the 130-turbine offshore wind project, just hoping to renegotiate some of its details.

New Bedford officials haven’t given up on the project, and they surely haven’t given up on the future of the offshore wind industry and the city’s role in it. They continue to project a message of optimism.

Those who would cheer this latest setback, however, have yet to articulate an intellectually valid reason for their joy.

Audra Parker, executive director of the Alliance to Protect Nantucket Sound, was quoted at CommonwealthMagazine.org after the announcement: “I think it’s very bad news for Cape Wind. Of course, it’s good news for Massachusetts ratepayers.”

What is it that Massachusetts ratepayers gain from a course of action that inhibits the necessary — and already tardy — development of renewable sources of energy to replace fossil fuels? Higher medical bills? Continuation of extraction methods that have, from the very beginning, denuded the earth, sickened the workers employed in the task and polluted every inch of the planet to some degree? A planet populated by so-called advanced nations with an economic system dependent upon neverending, unsustainable consumption?

We know what ratepayers have lost, as the fossil fuel industrial complex has never been held accountable for the true costs foisted upon a world full of people breathing pollution, digging coal, fishing the oceans.

The chief funder of Parker’s organization, of course, is one of the Koch brothers. His opposition to the Cape Wind project is often attributed to his unwillingness to have his Osterville vacation home’s ocean view adulterated by wind turbines.

That’s for him to know. But the Koch Brothers have spent tens of millions in dollars supporting other anti-renewables, pro-carbon advocacy groups.

Cheap Arabian oil, cost-effective hydraulic fracturing extraction and booming domestic oil production sustain not only the Koch empire, but the entire system of consumption by keeping that fossil-fuel-based economy profitable, and encouraging the market to ignore the renewables.

In a joint editorial board meeting Monday convened at the Worcester Telegram & Gazette by MassInc., the publishers of Commonwealth Magazine and its dot.org website, U.S. Sen. Elizabeth Warren spoke about energy policy, offshore wind and the XL pipeline (before the news that President Obama would veto any bill that would build the pipeline through the U.S.)

We really don’t have one now, and we are looking forward, albeit without too much optimism, to the pope’s promised encyclical on climate change and to the U.N. meeting in Paris, both due in the late summer and fall.

Fighting against wind turbines in Nantucket Sound on aesthetic grounds is like fighting against fresh water because it takes up too much room.

We need projects like Cape Wind. We need Congress to support its development with reliable financing tools, because the market — which is looking more and more like it’s rigged against progress — isn’t helping right now. And we don’t have time to waste.